Abstract Low rank matrix recovery has shown its importance as a theoretic foundation in many areas of information processing. Its solutions are usually obtained in batch mode that requires to load all the data into memory during processing, and thus are hardly applicable on large scale data. Moreover, a fraction of data may be severely contaminated by outliers, which makes accurate recovery significantly more challenging. This paper proposes a novel online robust low rank matrix recovery method to address these difficulties. In particular, we first introduce an online algorithm to solve the problem of low rank matrix completion. Then we move on to low rank matrix recovery from observations with intensive outliers. The outlier support is robustly estimated from a perspective of mixture model. Experiments on both synthetic and real data are conducted to demonstrate the efficacy of our method and show its superior performance over the state-of-the-arts.